Hard to pigeonhole as a comedy or drama, "Year of the Dog" comes down on the side of strange.

Molly Shannon, you're up.

The "Saturday Night Live" alum plays Peggy, a seriously single secretary who shies away from life and falls to pieces when her little dog, Pencil, gets erased.

Disconsolate, Peggy tries to seek solace from her family who could not care less, a friend (Regina King) who strains to cast her into the dating scene and two men -- one a cad (John C. Reilly) who probably caused Pencil's death and is bent on taking advantage of Peggy's insecurities, the other (Peter Sarsgaard) who's a fellow dog lover but not really a candidate.

When Peggy does not get the answers she wants (forget needs), she goes commando vigilante, at one point taking a page from "Fatal Attraction." Word to the wise: If you get on the wrong side of someone like Peggy, her mental door barely hanging from its hinges, don't turn your back on the closet.

White, who also wrote the script, takes his comic premise and twists it like a clown twisting balloons into a bizarre dachshund.

White makes his directing debut with "Year of the Dog." He hasn't had an easy time of it. The film tried to squeeze into theaters earlier this year, but presenters and audiences weren't biting. "Year of the Dog" was too odd for them.

As much could be expected from White, whose career in independent film took off with 2000's "Chuck & Buck" in which he played a loser who turns into a stalker of another guy.

Slipping into playing second bananas, White has found his niche as the screenwriter of such movies as "Nacho Libre," "The School of Rock" and "The Good Girl."
The laughs he pulls out of "Year of the Dog" rest uneasy, as does Molly Shannon's Peggy.

Here in an accomplished if uncharacteristic turn, Shannon is a far cry from Mary Katherine Gallagher, the effusive Catholic schoolgirl she immortalized in "SNL" television sketches and tanked in the 1999 movie bomb "Superstar."

Her Peggy is damaged goods, a vulnerable woman who snaps when she can't take it anymore.

Dogs are sad sack Peggy's solace, and "Year of the Dog," as would be expected from its title, has dogs running all over the place.

But when Peggy starts running all over the place, get out of the way. This is one animal activist not to be crossed.